Hughesey writes "With PC's beginning to enter the Home Entertainment scene, OC-Melbourne have come up with the perfect way to integrate a PC into your Home Theater setup. The OC-Melbourne HEPC. Quote From the Article: 'So now we have a PC that is capable of replacing many separate devices (such as a DVD player, and consoles), but lets admit it, that big beige case probably looks far worse than the hardware its replacing. Some people have gotten around this by using specialised cases such as those from Shuttle, or fancy aluminium cases such as those from LianLi. These cases, however, still don't integrate seamlessly into modern home theater systems, as they still maintain their "PC" look. Enter the OC-Melbourne HEPC...'"

An anonymous reader writes "With upcoming chipsets such as the SiS648 claiming support for the latest AGP8X standard, we asked ourselves if there were any performance benefits. We took the SiS648 and Xabre 400 reference boards, modified them and compared the results." I can't even get 4x stable under XP, so I figure 8x is half as likely to let me play NWN :)

thefalconer writes "MSNBC has a very detailed article about Motorola's new all-in-wonder phone offered by Nextel. It is a PDA, has a Walkie-Talkie, phone, web browser, instant messaging, addressbook, it has a high resolution Color LCD screen, and it's running on a Java Based OS! It even comes in a variety of styles and colors just to your taste. There is so much to this phone that it makes you ask "how'd they get all that, into this tiny little thing?" Makes me want to ditch my old phone for one of these right now!"

Sebby writes "This is pretty neat - the folks over at retrosystem rebuild old computers/consoles with new guts inside. They have Amiga 1000, Atari 2600, and also NES systems, with lots of options for configuration. If they only made a Sinclair ZX81 with the same specs, I'd be sold!" I mean, who wouldn't want a PC in an NES box ;)

stercor asks: "I've been considering random number generators made with easily-available materials. Living in Oregon might suggest photoelectric cells and rain. Or something to do with slugs (generation rate IS a factor, however) My question is what other off-the-wall shelf hare-brained brilliant ideas can other Slashdot readers come up with? Please limit ideas to ones that would actually work." When I was younger, I was always intrigued by the rigs used by most State Lotteries. You know the ones: dump balls into a chamber, throw in a fan/vacuum combination to agitate the balls and to allow a random one to shoot thru a tube when the button was pressed (basically, a high tech version of your average BINGO machine). Has anyone else seen or built a contraption that does something similar but in a weird, roundabout or weird and roundabout way?

Unstrung writes "US Military research agency DARPA is sick of all those static-filled cellphone calls and dropped connections too. The shadowy eggheads are working on a way of using the bandwidth available today more efficiently."

macemoneta asks: "Are there any notebooks available on the market that support (bootable) RAID (at least two 40GB+ drives as RAID0 and or RAID1)? While the rest of the components in 'desktop replacement' notebooks are quickly getting up to snuff, the hard drives are anemic in performance, capacity and reliability compared to desktops. Being able to use software RAID to create high performance meta devices and high reliability meta devices would really kick notebooks into high gear. Before anyone complains about size, weight, power and heat remember that notebooks have gone from 12 inch screens to 16 inch screens and 486 to P4M in the last few years. Most desktop replacement laptops use the batteries as a UPS, since they usually only last 90 minutes or less anyway."

justbeatit wrote to us with an article from Red Herring about the bad MEN of Wireless. MEN, of course, means Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia.

hilldaddy writes "AnandTech has a review up of the new Shuttle SS51 XPC. Looks like they finally added an AGP slot. Read the review." We've done several previous stories on the Shuttle mini-PC systems.

sonamchauhan asks: "I'd like advice on building (yes, building) my own low-res touchscreen. The reasons for 'build' instead of 'buy' are: 1) to have it sense pressure (pressure sensing is quite expensive) and 2) to have it sense multiple points of contact simultaneously (which is a useful thing). Back in 1985, researchers at U.Toronto built (PDF file) a touch-tablet (not a touch-screen) that fulfilled both requirements (pressure-sensitive and multi-touch) and used only basic electronics: lots of diodes, A/D convertors, etc. Some 17 years later, it should be possible to build a touch-screen using the same techniques (possibly using layers of transparent conductive and insulating paint for the sensor paths.) Any comments? Some other links: a Microsoft paper (PDF file) describing a touch sensor painted onto a mouse, a basic FAQ on current touchscreen technology, and a slashdot thread that discussed building touchscreens (these links don't address pressure or multi-touch though)."

Jonathan Bennett writes "Here's the first actual review (as opposed to speculation) of Motorola's FreeCharge hand-operated mobile phone charger. Only works with Motorola phones for now, but other devices on the way. "

CrazyDwarf asks: "I dug up and old system that my company was about to toss in the dumpster and decided to load Linux on it. My problem: the BIOS will not recognize more than 500 MB of the HDD. I don't have a CD-ROM for this PC. I was looking for a BIOS upgrade download, but AWARD wants me to buy it from some third party. If I could afford to buy it from them, I wouldn't be doing all this, I'd just get a CD-Rom and move on. Where are some good places for me to go find a free (no cost) download to upgrade my BIOS? I have been searching for an hour on Google and have not really found anything."

NightWhistler asks: "I've been hearing stories for some time now about digital modules that can be used inside normal photo camera's as a sort of 'digital film', effectively turning a standard camera into a digital one. If they exist and performance is good, I would love to get my hands on one of those babies... ;-) Has anyone actually seen one of these, or perhaps have experience with them?" There may have been one company that did this, but I think they went out of business, recently. I've always thought this was a neat idea, but is there really a market for this kind of modification?

NeoMagick asks: "I live in a rural town in the Pacific Northwest, and I'll soon be picking up a Shuttle system which will get mounted in the trunk of my car, and patched into probably an Alpine or Pyle in-dash LCD panel. This last week temperatures have gotten up to 105degF, and have been known to get to -10degF in the winters. I'm wondering if any /.ers have had issues with computers in cars in such extreme temperatures (overheating? freezing?), and if so what they did to solve such problems."

joefefifo writes: "e.Digital has a press release describing their Odyssey 1000, supposedly due out in the fall. Some stats: Looks like an iPod, uses USB 2.0., has a 20GB capacity, built-in mic for voice recording and navigation, FM Tuner with 12 presets, Mac & PC compatible, iTunes compatible, runs e.Digital's MicroOS 2.0. Except for the choice of OS, looks pretty sweet. Any chance someone will get it to run Linux instead?" Like Toshiba's little player, it uses USB 2 rather than Firewire.

Noah Bergevin writes: "While web browsing one day, I ran across a little gadget at a favorite e-tailer of mine, and fell in love with it at first sight. It's a super-small cordless telephone that you hang on your ear, and which uses voice-recognition instead of a physical keypad to do the dialing. It's from a company called ArialPhone. They have only been around since January 2001, and the phone has been out for about a year." Read on to see what's good and not-as-good about this phone with the rest of Noah's review.

gwernol writes: "Redherring has a good article on Sony's forthcoming PlayStation 3: not too many technical details but good background to the Xbox/PlayStation wars. Sony are touting the use of massively parallel 'cell computing' to get a 1,000 times performance increase over the PS2. This plan, also known as grid computing is also discussed here."

Anonymous Coward writes: "Currently almost everyone with a computer has a CD-ROM drive and also a big part of them have a CD-RW drive. But what if you want to spend less time on writing a CD-R ? You have to buy a new one, or, if you are a real geek, you just overclock it! Seems to be to good to be true ? It's not! Currently a lot of cheap manufacturers of CD-RW drives are using the same parts in their 32x,40x, and 48x drives and start to sell them at 32x, later to 40x and in end as 48x. and with a little upgrading of the firmware (totally legal) you will have a faster drive, because you remove its limits! It currently works on drives from Lite-On (who also makes drives for Memorex, TDK, Iomega, Cendyne, TraxData and Pacific digital all overclockable) And the list goes on as there are also overclock tricks for LG (32x -> 40x) and Sony drives (32x -> 48x). If you don't believe it, read all the reactions and the postings on the forums mentioned above!"

Werner Heuser writes "At MobiliX there is a survey of app. 100 laptop manufacturers and their Linux status available now. It contains a list of manufacturers, which are the most popular with Linux users. And some criticism about misleading manufacturer announcements for Linux support. The survey finishes with hints to laptop certifications, independent vendors and how to get rid of the "Microsoft Tax". And finally there is a A-Z list of almost 100 manufacturers and their Linux status. Besides Linux also other UniXes are mentioned and some hints about laptops with other CPUs than from Intel are included."

guttentag writes "The New York Times reports Sematech (the international consortium of computer chip makers that turned Austin, TX into a tech center) plans to turn Albany, NY into a research hub. The consortium, which represents IBM, Intel, Motorola, HP, TI, AMD, Philips and others, will put up $193 million for the project while New York State will supply the remaining $210 million. The really unusual thing about the deal is that the state isn't offering any tax breaks or loans to lure the consortium to its capital. Why are they so excited about a location that is over 100 miles from their nearest constituent company (IBM)?"